News from the Blogosphere: Googlebomb busted

From SearchEngineLand.com:

Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American
May. 9, 2007 at 1:06pm Eastern by Danny Sullivan

Sadness, Colbert fans! Last month, I reported in Google Declares Stephen Colbert As Greatest Living American how Stephen Colbert had defied Google’s link bombing defenses and rose to be the greatest living American, according to a search for those words at Google. Today, it is no longer so. Google has dissed Colbert.

Google Drops The Bomb: Hand Job or Chron Job? from Jonah Stein over at Alchemist Media, who orchestrated the initial Colbert victory, notes the disappearance.

When Colbert initially ranked, I’d written how odd it was that Colbert was ranking well for terms that didn’t show up on his web page, since Google supposedly put measures in place (see Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google) back in January to prevent Google bombs like this from happening:

So what’s the deal? Wasn’t the Google fix supposed to prevent this exact thing?

Yes, actually. Of course, we’ve had a few exceptions cited, suchclick here ranking things like Adobe and Apple downloads. Maybe Google’s Matt Cutts will come along to shed some more light on the situation. I suspect the answer will be that the link bomb fix Google uses is more sophisticated than just looking to see if the words people are using in links, when a lot of links suddenly point at a page, actually appear on a page.

Google never explained how Colbert got around the link bomb fix. Now it seems like they’ve either manually made an adjustment — a "hand job" as SEOs like to call it — or made an algorithm change. Since Google routinely denies doing hand jobs, I assume the official response (I’ll try to get one) will be an algo change.

For the record, Colbert remains ranked fifth on Yahoo, first on Live.com and still ignored by Ask.comk, for searches on "greatest living american," when looking at the first page of results.